'Abundance' is the fifth volume of scifi-romance-philosophy series 'Kindred Spirits' exploring a future where mankind has made intergalactic contact with eleven different groups of aliens. Part plot point, part trailer, part experiment to see what all the shiny buttons on my new piece of equipment did, this extract from the audiobook (available soon from Audible; paperback and ebook available from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B094HJ795W )features twelve of the companies featured, one for each alien.

A Word From Our Sponsors (Kindred Spirits Audiobook Trailer)

The last track of Branches is possibly the best of the songs on here and its simple mournful riff seems to work in a variety of different ways. In fact I tried to use it as part of my A Level Music coursework – but despite being told it was a lovely tune and my best by far it didn’t follow enough ‘rules’ so didn’t get a high mark. This is why I despair of our education system – music is not a mathematics and nor should it be taught as such, although I do talk about the odd mathematical term on the albums on this site. After all, for the greatest part of human history, music was never written down so its only a recent idea that we should care about how many beats there are in a bar and modulated chords and so on. I also got told off for writing too much in my discussions of my own pieces – imagine me talking too much about music! Erm, moving on...this first recording of this song is still the ‘keeper’, however, with a world-weariness that I’ve never been able to capture again, mainly thanks to another wonderfully psychedelic and ghostly footpedal. Again there are two pianos here, with the percussive effect created by lightly striking the piano with a pencil while the loud pedal was left on and closely miking the effect. As for the lyrics, this is another piece that seemed to arrive from nowhere and I’m at a lost as to understand what it means, although I think I do (if you follow me), which is my part of the trilogy that also includes Eleanor Rigby and Lady Eleanor, two of the greatest song sever written as far as I’m concerned. There’s also a kinder rebuttal to John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’, only instead of being clever and classless and free this heroine’s classless and kind. The lyrics came at the same time as the tune and I had to hastily scramble to a bit of paper the minute I stopped the recording machine. 

Clear Mind

Someone who heard some of my music as shown above once dismissed it out of hand because he found there was no obvious rhythm to it. I’ve always maintained that a regular beat is less important to a song than its melody or harmony, so devised this track as proof – the song keeps religiously to the metronome beat until the song’s second half when the track gets so worked up it gradually moves off the beat, but hopefully the listener is so caught up in the melody and impact of the song that they won’t notice! There are two lots of double overdubs here – ie left and right hand twice over. Improvising this amount of ideas and still keeping things melodic is usually impossible, it certainly proved so in other experiments, but really worked for this track which is one of my favourites from all of these examples. I’m especially proud of the controlled chaos in the middle with two voices competing against each other in a wrestle with time. The theme of this song is in fact running out of time before you get a chance to do what you want to do, with the heart a very real timekeeping clock as it counts your chances down with each heartbeat. The first verse actually start at 1:15 for those who want to try following the lyrics along to the music. I tried to submit a version of this song for my A Level Music coursework, transposing the four parts into a string quartet, but not very successfully judging by the mark I got!

The Beating Of The Heart Drags On

his track was originally the second on the Branches LP. Don’t ask about the first – it’s been missing from the various dubs I’ve made of the record since as it never really quite worked (well, some of them don’t do they  - I don’t think there’s one record I’ve reviewed on this site that was perfect all the way through. Except for ‘Smile’ maybe). Anyway this track turned out quite nicely. The rain sound effect overdubbed on the beginning of the track is like most of these first dozen tracks from an old sound effect record – FX were originally a large part of the Branches experience, akin to what the original version of The Kinks’ ‘Face To face’ should have sounded like and the album sounds sort of lost without them to jumble up the ideas. I’ve noticed since writing this piece that the chorus of this song seems to be heading towards ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’. I never noticed while I was writing the thing, but my melody downturns where Judy Garland et al reach up to the skies, which is kind of fitting in a way – this is what Dorothy was probably singing when she woke up and found herself back in Kansas again and hated going back to normal. Anyone who has read the main site will also recognise the title from The Hollies album Evolution. The title fitted too well with the album’s themes of reflection and relationships (Branches in a pun on drawing up family trees, as well as a reference to how Nostradamus claimed to get his inspiration from in the prophecies – and no, I don’t buy the current line of thought that claims he’s talking about a tripod!) to turn the idea down and its always been a song close to my heart for a whole number of reasons. This track has some slight overdubs in the higher parts but not all the way through and, sound effects aside, was one of the simplest songs here. You were not the last to leave me but the first to believe in me.

Rain On My Window

The muffled sound on this track is deliberate (if a bit more accentuated than it was meant to be), in order to give the album’s sounds a bit of distinctiveness and contrast with the last tracks’ clear ringing tones (yes I did have a dummy sheet of what the running order would be before half of these songs were written, because that’s me all over, although it did get tweaked a fair bit by the end). This track does feature two pianos – the bass and treble parts were recorded separately – the latter without the footpedal, the former with, which is why it has such a ‘contrasting’ sound that hopefully is a bit ear-catching. Both parts were played independently and improvised. There are no lyrics to this one by the way: this song never seemed to need them.

Minute Quantity

Not much to add really – more fun with two pianos. The repetitive bass line was recorded first, with the ‘mute’ or quite pedal for the most part, only occasionally lifting for sudden bursts near the end. I then added the treble part over the top using the ‘loud’ or echoey pedal for another song about contrasts and characteristically reversed them in the mix so that the bass part is on the right and the treble on the left: I love mixing sounds this way so that they sound different to how they should normally be. The coyotes howling at the start are a homage to the similar cry of pain on John Lennon’s ‘Scared’, back when this album was completely segued  by sound effects. I never did manage to fit any lyrics I liked to this song, although unlike some of the other instrumentals here this piece always sounded as if it should have had something extra with it.

Weighs A Tonne

Not a lot to say about this song, except that it was rather unexpected – the riff I had in my head before beginning this song couldn’t be more different to the one that came when I started the tape player! The car engine at the start is from a sound effects record – I was planning my ‘Branches’ album to be linked throughout by sound effects at the beginning and most of them are still included here – I’d been enthralled by reports of how the earliest version of The Kinks’ ‘Face To Face’ sounded, with sound effects in the ‘bands’ instead of silence, and wanted to emulate that a bit. The ‘engine’ here just seemed to fit naturally on a song about not getting things to work no matter how hard you try. There were lyrics to this one once upon a time but I can’t remember them or find my copy of them: a probable sign that they weren’t very good as I still remember most of the others from this period!

I Can't Get My Engine To Start

The first to be recorded of the Branches tracks, this one features two pianos in separate speakers – the lower notes in the right and the higher notes in the left. This experiment of swapping the sides of the piano over irritates as many people as it pleases, but always sounded pretty good to me. The drop-out towards the end of the song is not deliberate (it got wiped when laying the next song as intended – but sadly the tape copy got chewed up before I could put it onto CD) but sounds quite atmospheric so I’ve almost convinced myself to tell you it was deliberate! The opening squeaky sound effect is the tape played back at double time where, because the original is so amazingly slow, it actually sounds like a ‘proper’ speed, rather than the Mickey-Mouse effect you get on other speeded up tapes (I first found out this trick when my copy of The Monkees’ ‘Porpoise Song’ got stuck in a tape machine and sounded fantastic played at twice the speed!) This one did have lyrics, but they haven’t dated that well and wouldn’t make that much sense to anyone but me so I’ve left them off here.

Wings Of Broken Glass

Ever heard of the group Watermania? Well, probably not because they only sang in my bathroom when I was 6 or 7. They had a lot of hits though, if only on a local level (they were all bath toys after all!) and ended up filling rather a lot of notebooks with song titles, usually based on some tedious puns to do with water. I remembered this title because it seemed to fit well with the album’s themes of a searching for an idyllic place and finding it too slippery to hang on to when you reach there. The sound at the beginning of this song is my piano stool squeaking by the way and yes I do know its there, so don’t email in and complain! (Its ambience to get you in the mood that’s all – and extremely hard to edit!)  Incidentally, our company Spareroom Studios’ most successful band The Austounders might be making a reunion single sometime soon, because all the members have been living the high life for 15 years and are rather short of cash. (Well, it’s of more importance to the world in general than the Spice Girls getting back together!) I’m deeply annoyed that I can’t find the words to this one because they’d make a lot more sense of the song (unusually the words came first and were set to music afterwards) but are similar to the forthcoming ‘Glacier Bay #2’. This song kicked off side two of Branches for those who care about these things!

Glacier Bay #1

More of a mournful hymn than the Blues Brothers, the title is another pun on something but fits the theme of being hung out to dry. Again, the sound quality isn’t up to the majority of songs – and there’s a bit of a botched edit somewhere in the middle, but the tune is too haunting and I keep coming back to it so often that it would be a shame not to have it in this collection. (Before anyone complains about my editing skills as well – bet you didn’t notice the one in Swallow, or the ones coming up in Ocean’s Smile and Changing Stations. So there). I’m convinced there were lyrics to this one but I can’t find them anywhere or quite remember how they go, so this song will have to stand on its own, as it were.

Washing Line Blues

This is more of a riff than a song but boy what a riff – possibly the greatest hook I’ve written and certainly one of the most rounded. Full Album Archive bonus points if you spotted that it’s the same tune that was tucked away at the end of Dry Leaves. The earliest piano-based track here, from 1997, this song sports another title that’s got lost in the midst of the mists of time but probably has something to do with the squirrel’s perfect positioning in the animal kingdom between being terribly tame and still belonging to the wild which seemed to go with the riff’s ebbing and flowing rather well. Although, as you’re probably thinking ‘nuts to that’, it may well have been named after something else I’m not sure – I’ve always had a softy spot for squirrels after all, one species I’m convinced is much more intelligent than we currently think. Originally this was the release of a song that built and built over several verses, akin to Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, but it never worked as well as I wanted so I Just developed the ending part. There are no lyrics this time around.

Ode To A Squirrel

This song came like a bolt out of the blue, the way the best ones do, the week after I had my Moving Pictures album wrapped up and finished (or so I thought). Unusually for me, I got the riff in my head before attempting it on the piano - with the lyrics coming just as fast as the music -  and scrambled to record it so fast the only tape I could find to record on was a used (but thankfully transferred) one. After recording it I hastily scribbled down the lyrics – which concern the fact that the present is mankind’s last chance to change direction and prevent the end of its own evolutionary cycle (beat that, Spice Girls!) The song is also about the widely held belief that dolphins and whales are an equally intelligent species to man but express their intellect in different ways – in which case, what can they be thinking about mankind’s destruction of the planet they also share, however they interpret it. Either these species genuinely aren’t intelligent – or perhaps they know the secret to escape already (and are about to say so long and thanks for all the fish). Hmmn, I think I lost myself in that argument, never mind you lot, to think there’s still people around who don’t think I’m monkeynuts.I’ve forgotten whether it was a deliberate effect or not now, but playing back the piano with two faders still left me two to dabble with which began to play….BACKWARDS! (Its like hearing the Beatles’ Rain must have been the first time. Where’s Ringo when you need him?!?). (The piece playing backwards was a spare copy of a Radio 3 performance of Holst’s Lyric Movement if anyone wants to stand on their head and sing along with it, although chances are it was something before or after it on the tape, I’m not sure what now. Given Holst’s own early attempts at psychedelia a century before the name was even coined and stretching the boundaries of composition, I’m sure he’d have appreciated my efforts). The opening flurry of backwards loops was me afterwards scrolling through the cassette and trying to find a catchy beginning! My MP50 machine also runs at twice the speed of a ‘normal’ cassette player by the way: most four-tracks tend to do that so that the front and back sides play at once, letting you play with the left and right channels twice over. Spookily the alien-sounding voices (actually the R3 announcer speeded up) come in directly at the point where the lyrics (which were written first remember) talk about ‘the appearance of another race.’ There’s more than a little of The Byrds’ ‘CTA-102’ about this track, with gobbledegook alien voices, although the mood here is sinister rather than jovial. Listen out for the eerie closing noise too, which is actually a ‘mistake’ of the microphone dragging across the floor after recording the vocals – it seemed to fit, though, so it got added into the final mix. Talking of which, sadly my original ‘mix’ of this song cut off partway through so this is a later version with an edit 90 seconds before the end from another copy and is, I promise, the only time on these songs you’ll hear me singing, even if it is badly ducked in the mix. I’m sure that I didn’t really write this one by the way and that it just ‘beamed in’ from somewhere else. Some songs are real efforts where you know full well you sweated buckets over every line – but not this one, I didn’t change a line from it arriving in my head and that’s not usually the case I have to say; I can’t wait to meet the ‘alien’ who really did write this one for me one day! Thank goodness I hadn’t read Dave Davies’ book about aliens contacting him to ‘commission’ songs about ecology or I would have been even more alarmed! 

Ocean's Smile

If you’ve been thinking to yourself ‘we haven’t had a moody ballad in a while and there were loads at the beginning, I wonder what’s happened to them’ then you are 1) getting into this site worryingly deeply and have my deepest sympathy for suffering the music I’ve inflicted on you and 2) your wish just came true with this track. A song about polar opposites, it’s also my celebration for getting a decent result for an essay on the Elizabeth Gaskell novel of the same name. This is my period when I’d discovered Cat Stevens and was busy wondering what might have happened following the song ‘I’m Gonna Be King’ on ‘New Masters’. Not this, probably, but then I’d forgotten that Graham Nash had already written the perfect sequel with ‘I Used To Be A King’. Looking back at it now, it sounds more like a King’s Singers recording of a madrigal I used to play a lot, for one line at least. Every house has a north and south – otherwise it would get awfully drafty. 

North And South

Another of the ‘2 Parts Fire’ songs or whatever the heck I called it. The lyrics in this song refer to change in the wider sense but is also a homage to Stephen Stills who likes writing songs comparing his ever-changing personal life with the changing chords or ‘changes’ of a song. There are a lot of changes in this one too which again is unusual for me and is probably the result of writing the words – or at least a version of them – first, although the ever-moving tune is probably more typical! I see there’s a sneaky George Harrison reference in there too – kudos to anyone who spots it! This was meant to be more of a ‘social’ song than the others, in the last three verses at least, but I doubt anyone else would notice that from hearing it! Still, it seemed a shame to leave it out of this list because the tune is one of the better ones of the period – I just wish I’d done more with it. 

A Series Of Changes

or while there was one of these titles on everything I did. This time around Glacier Bay has been discovered but its rather hard to stay there when so much is going on trying to make you grow up. As Mike will surely tell you after I nick his pillows and hide them for the umpteemph time that day, there’s a large part of me that probably never will. Sorry about that everyone. There’s also a snippet reprise of ‘Into Your Arms’, the previous track on the album – wow and I hadn’t even discovered the splintered delights of ‘Smile’ back then! These lyrics actually came a long time after the melody on another song from ’2 Parts Fire’. 

Glacier Bay #2

Gosh, how do I describe this one? A Scottish two-step jig and a hymnal chorus might not be the most natural sounding bedfellows but always seemed to work for this song, practical and spiritual at the same time. One of the longer, more spacious yet repetitive songs from ‘2 Parts Fire’, the song was designed to be faded, but I liked the unintended full-stop so well I left it in. Another song on one of my favourite themes too: what is out there when we die? I spent a whole year of a creative writing classes trying to find out, but despite using a combination of James Joyceian prose, talking frogs and sci-fi epics about the 23rd gateway of time I never did find out. I reckon I came closest here. When I do go I can tell you one thing – my ghost will still be writing these reviews on Alan’s Album Archives (and if my soul should dare to roam, box its ears and send it home!)

The Lights Of Heaven

…And there’s always a ‘good’ in ‘goodbye’. This is actually an optimistic song about how one bad experience shouldn’t hold you back but, well, you’ll see what I mean when we print the lyrics up. There are two pianos on this one, the second one added later that doubles up the bass riff but slightly out of synch, setting up a full throttle rumble and letting the right-hand melody sound more feeble and isolated than normal, as if its pushing forward and mimicking the feeling of panic or being thrown from one view to another. You see, composers do sometimes think of daft things like this when they’re working, so my wild theories elsewhere on this website might not be quite so crazy! There is another shocking edit heading towards the song’s last verse but, well, you try and get all the notes right when you’re improvising a song that seems to be charging at 300mph. How thrilling that feeling is, oblivious of how the end product turns out! Incidentally, I so wish I’d still got my original mix of this song which sounded much better – most of the ‘ropey’ sounding songs here sounded tonnes better when I added a mix of echo to them, but not this one alas! 

There's Always A 'Hell' In 'Hello'

I was actually meant to be writing lyrics for the ‘2 Parts Water to 1 Part Fire’ album the day I came up with this – the last I’d set aside for working on this project. I’m not sure where this song came from because I only actually headed to the tape recorder to jot down the opening section which had suddenly heard in my head. The rest of the tune came out of nowhere however – I swear I had never played the notes of the majestic first verse before this recording and I have no idea how the whole thing ended up being one of the most complex tunes on this page. Somehow the rumbling ominous opening riff and the tinkling high notes seemed the perfect close to an album whose theme was being poised between past and future and it seemed natural to make it the last track on this, the  last of the three albums more or less complete here. I think this song was another double-tracked, with the main tune played first and an overdubbed of sudden, stabbed chords to add to the unsettling effect – and yes, I do have the ‘loud’ pedal firmly on again here, adding to the nicely echoey, chaotic feel. The words took me a while longer to get right – the title is a note to self to give them a few alterations that seemed to fit nicely as a pun on ‘all change’. It’s really about stubborness this song, refusing to give up your focus when everyone thinks you’re going down the wrong road – and yet you know there isn’t any other road you could possibly take. I must admit that, sitting here now in 2011, with this the last ‘finished’ song to date, the words seem somewhat prophetic – or is that pathetic? – especially the lines about ‘body may be broken’ some five years before I fell ill with CFS and this whole website might as well have the end motto that ‘still I won’t change’.... 

Change (All)

Musical anorak with 1960s/70s music reviews site (in fact two: www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk where the reviews are easier to find and www.alansalbumarchives.moonfruit.com where the reviews are really hard to find but everything looks so pretty). All of these songs were recorded between 1996 and 2000 when I was alarmingly young and were recorded on a simple machine. I add them a) because they might as well be here as well as gathering dust on a shelf and b) it helps add a bit of music to my sites (seeing as everything written by everybody else is still in copyright!)

Having written 101 album reviews, nearly destroyed four computers and almost single-handedly closed the Skills Exchange (where the first draft of this website was made) it seemed clear to me that the one thing my new super duper all-singing all-dancing website dedicated to the art of music was missing was..wait for it...music. With that in mind, it seemed a good idea to open Alan’s genuine album archives and let you readers listen to the musical treasure troves that had been gathering dust on my shelves for the past decade and reveal to you just why I feel I have a minute bit of knowledge to write about the process of songwriting elsewhere on this site. Now, I’ve tried every which way to get my files online – regular readers will tell you that this is the one section of the site that’s had a ‘coming soon’ sticker next to it since pretty much day one – including links to sister sites and an aborted attempt to use the ‘moonfruit’ juke boxes (which didn’t seem to accept my files for some reason. In the end, the answer was surprisingly simple – after our original web hosts t35.com shut down their free service I discovered that Sky Files on Windows Live allowed me to add music files as well as written ones. Now, at last, some five years after the first sentence was written for this site and some 15 years after the earliest pieces here were made, I can at last bring you 30-odd songs dating from four separate writing projects: ‘Encomiuming To Us All’ ‘Branches’ and ‘2 Parts Water To One Part Fire’, plus a few odds and ends. If nothing else, it will give all the musicians I’ve criticised on this site a chance to get their own back! 


All of these songs are written single-handedly by me, performed single handedly by me and were played on the same worn-out piano. The tapes were made over an increasingly large amount of years past on an MP50 overdubbing miracle machine, transferred onto analogue cassette and only now –years later – onto digital CD. (Hence the sound quality. Sorry, the amazing new technology had only just been invented when I first started and it was hard enough getting this stuff on cassette originally, never mind CD). Practically all of these songs are on piano and practically all of these are improvised (the exceptions I’ll be telling you about later) and were literally done by me finding a nice idea or phrase that set something off in my subconscious and left me frantically reaching for the recording equipment before I could forget how the phrases went ( I still forgot anyway more often than not and went on to find something else instead).   

Most of the time I never knew where I was going with these songs – they all seemed to find their natural way to the end without much of my help. As a result, there’s the odd duff note here and there though not as many as there ought to be considering I’m making this stuff up as I go along, so apologies – but what you lose by way of the odd mistake is made up for by the magic in the room (I hope). In short, think of these tapes as a pioneering primitive album in the spirit of McCartney or Let It Be rather than a full-blown polished epic like Band On The Run or Sgt Peppers. I’m also rather hampered by the fact that my MP50 machine has (hopefully temporarily) stopped working, so I only have access to my cassette copies, which were in turn copied onto CD by an extremely moody computer copies few years back! The player is now broken so I can’t, alas, retrieve any more for my computer to put on CD or add a few of the others I had lurking around. I know this stuff doesn’t sound perfect all the through – but most of it sounds better than expected, so just enjoy the bits that are! You’ll also be pleased to learn that, although I did make recordings of my singing for the lyrics, more as a record of where they go than anything else, I’ve spared you my godawful voice for the mixes here. Alas, working with only a four-track tape recorder means that a handful of other interesting bits were mixed in with the vocals and are lost now too – but seeing as my tambourine playing isn’t all that much better than my singing you’re lucky to have been spared this as well!

 In case you’re wondering by the way – I never ever got a decent song written when setting up the tape deck before playing: I tried several times over the years but no, there’s something about charting the unknown that brings out the best in the art of creation – and the Goddess of music probably wanted a cheap laugh along the way too. I’ve added a bit about each song and the lyrics, where relevant or remembered, for you to enjoy while listening to the music. Oh and at the moment the links merely take you to a long list of the songs when you press on the ‘globe’. Sorry about that: hopefully I’ll get that fixed in the future and I’ll let you know when it does. Oh and to the few people who’ve been waiting in anticipation for these songs and want to know which of the AAA groups they most sound like: well, there’s bits and pieces there but they don’t really sound like anybody I’m afraid. My real inspiration from the groups we cover from this site (and were in my record collection at the time) is to be yourself and find your own style.

This first opening batch of songs all come from a record I called Branches and dates back to 1998-99, the period just after pushing the limit of my MP50 overdubbing machine (sadly a bit of a museum piece now) and trying to go back to basics. You do hear two pianos and a few other things going on in these tracks but unlike the later earlier tracks (oops, well, you know what I mean…they’re coming up later on the list!) there isn’t usually anything else playing here, its all done on piano (even if it’s a piano set up to sound like a flugelhorn or something). The idea of ‘Branches’ was to be a sort of family tree in sound, with each experience and encounter with another person adding to your idea of who you are. I’ve also been fascinated by Nostradamus’ cryptic explanation of how he used to divine the future by ‘placing my rod against the BRANCHES’  (brackets on the original) – no one’s quite sure what this is (though a simple tripod is the favourite explanation), although if I know my Nostradmus he’ll have meant something metaphysical, like imagining himself as a tree with branches or something. Anyway, the title fitted nicely all round and it’s the album I’m most pleased with, hence the fact that its listed here first. Think of it as Pet Sounds without the strings or Brian Wilson’s perfect hearing, played on an out-of-tune piano. All of these songs have been ‘treated’ with a touch of echo from a CD-rom kit too to give them that nice warm reverb feeling – by some combin ation of luck and magic I must have had my microphoned set up in just the right place to make this work, but alas it just sounds awful when added to the other tracks here so I took it off again. 

The second album here is ‘1 Parts Water To Two Parts Fire’, a rather longwinded name for a project from Summer 2001. The title is fun with horoscopes – one of the tracks included here, ‘Glacier Bay #2’  has a line in it about strength from fires but feeling hurt like two  parts water’ which is about the fire and water signs in horoscopes. Actually, my horoscope is 2 parts fire to 1 part water with a little bit of air (probably hot air) thrown in. As a postscript, having had my horoscope done since I’ve discovered that Venus, my planet of communications, is in Gemini which means a) I’m passionate about the arts and b) I tend to write too much, which is proof of how accurate they can be when drawn up properly! This album wasn’t named until late in the day and seemed, unplanned, to be full of references to suns and seas so it seemed to fit quite naturally. Unlike Branches, which was taped at a rate of two songs a month for eight months, this was all done in a three month rush. Alas, despite being recorded later, the recording quality isn’t quite as strong as on the earlier songs: I think my microphone broke and I only had an inferior one to work with – that and the fact my piano was ever more out of tune!

Finally, the offcuts in the third batch were mainly meant for the album ‘Encomiuming To Us All’. (For those who don’t know – probably all of you not currently studying classic languages - encomium actually Greek for the word ‘eulogy’, which I’ve combined with the old CSN phrase of ‘love coming to us all. You see, you get an education as well as entertainment on this site!) They date from 1997 and aren’t really linked by any real theme. There’s a handful of other offcuts here too – two outtakes from an aborted session in 2002 that never seemed to work as well as the earlier songs and the earliest song here from 1996, recorded on a keyboard borrowed from my high school one summer. This was thankfully put onto tape before the keyboard blew up and blew me backwards across the room I was taping in due to a faulty socket – thankfully both me and the keyboard were OK, but it proved a valuable lesson for how hazardous recording music was! For the record, I’ve been messing around with tape recorders and pianos since I was seven, though the 30 odd songs here are easily the best of the bunch. 


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